Spotting historical figures and celebrities in my food

It is time for me to get rich. Long enough have I wallowed about, toeing the line of abject poverty when I could be tap dancing into the lap of luxury.

Why shouldn’t I be rich? I look nice in good clothes, have expensive tastes in shoes, and how else will I afford gas for my stretch Hummer?

Lucky for me I’ve finally figured out how to do it. Not by working hard. Not by playing the lottery. Not even by trying to convince Nigerian email scammers that I am an American prince who has been overthrown by his people and now needs to transfer $32 million from a seed bank in Kansas to my newly adopted home in Botswana. (That one had real potential!)

How will I do it? Easy. By spotting historical figures and celebrities in my food, then selling them online to lunatics with too much money. I’ll be awash in cash! And all for things I see on a daily basis. (Just the other day I saw Erkel on a banana peel.)

Maybe you’ve heard of the woman who just made $8,000 selling a McDonald’s chicken nugget that resembled George Washington. She kept the presidential clump of deep fried chicken in her freezer, then sold it to raise money for a youth camp in Iowa.

Personally I didn’t see Washington. I saw Grandpa from “The Munsters” or Dick Cheney before his morning coffee. Both of them could have raised her payday. But either way, there’s money to be made from food. And not by eating it. That’s so 20th century.

People pay to see this kind of stuff all the time. They go nuts for it. Elvis on a steak? Liberace in a jelly bean? Michael Jackson’s glove in a tuna salad sandwich. That’s when you know you’ve hit the big leagues.

Religious figures show up all the time. A coffee shop in Tennessee once saw Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun. They put it in a glass case and people flocked to see it. (Even though it didn’t look like Mother Theresa. It didn’t even look like a cinnamon bun. It looked like one of those pottery creations your children make at school and you have to feign excitement when you put it on display — “Look! Little Johnny made … a diseased kidney!”

Jesus often shows up in potato chips, slices of toast, shower mold, even burned fish sticks. And great significance is always placed on these miraculous returns. As if the son of God is going to make his long-awaited return in a frozen chunk of processed fish. Now if he were singing a duet with Elvis, that’s another story.

But beside the point. It’s not whether these figures are actually in our food — their spirits looking for a way back or to send us a message: “Jesus says, ‘Eat more processed fish!’” The point is there’s money to be made, and I’m just the guy to make it. Because I see them, too. All the time.

Once I saw Gorbachev in a pancake. Even more amazing was inside the spot on his forehead you could clearly see Reagan imploring him to “tear down this wall!” That’s something, right?

Luckily a lot of these images appear when food is cooked wrong or burned. I do this all the time. And sometimes the food I cook has the same effect on people as smoking peyote. They see all kinds of things! There’s a restaurant concept in there — a place where you could stare at your food until the image of Captain Kirk or Mr. T appears. If I can just make them 3-D, I could franchise it.

A few years back a grilled cheese with the Virgin Mary singed into it sold for $28,000 on eBay. There’s gold in them there sandwiches. Imagine what I could make for Obama arm-wrestling Sarah Palin. Shouldn’t take me more than 15 or 16 tries.

I don’t know why we have this obsession with apparitions in our daily rations. But I do know we can’t get enough. That we’re searching for something more than a 99-cent nugget in that bag of fast food. Some seek messages. Others notoriety and fame. Me? I’m just looking to get rich. So if you’ll excuse me, I have some frozen waffles that need scorching. Come on Marilyn Monroe kissing Abe Lincoln!